Under the Pear Tree

by Asa Merritt 

In the moments before she bit him, Belle was running faster than I’d ever seen her run. A black mass zooming across the immense sunset, towards the pear tree, towards my nephew underneath the pear tree, who even then was about to throw another pear. Pelt her, another time, even though she’d snapped her massive jaws in his face only hours before. I saw it happen, walked from the screen porch to the yard, lit a cigarette, and told him not to treat her like that. This time, when the pear struck her face as she ran, she didn’t snap her jaws, she opened them and kept them open. I screamed at Belle as I ran from the porch and the door slammed behind me, then it slammed again, and his mother was beside me, and we ran.

“Jack!” I shouted, knowing what was about to happen, which then happened—

Belle lept from the ground and clamped her jaws on my nephew’s shoulder, then pulled, then fell back to the ground on her hind legs, eyes wide, a chunk of flesh from his shoulder unravelling in her mouth. We got to my nephew, already awash in blood, and I took off my t-shirt and tied the t-shirt around his arm as tight as I could.

“The duct tape, Jack!” I screamed. “Jack!”

The porch door slammed again and I heard my brother running, so overweight now, panting, heaving. I looked and he had the tape. Dad always kept it right on top of the gun cabinet, and even though Jack hadn’t visited in so so long, he knew it was there, and he was running to me as fast as he could, scared, parent-scared, and he got to us and knelt beside Katrina, that’s my brother’s wife’s name, who was bent over my nephew, saying his name, saying, “We’re here, we’re here,” again and again. Jack peeled out a yard of tape, cut it with his teeth, then circled the shirt with the tape and cinched the shirt as tight as he could, tighter than I could have, stronger than me, like always.

As we ferried my nephew across the yard, I told Jack to walk slower. The prairie dogs had riddled the ground that year, and the day’s last light was not enough to spot their holes. Katrina walked ahead. She started the truck, pulled through the gate, got out, then waited in the space between the back of the truck and the gateway to deter any cows from entering the yard. On past visits, she had always been thoughtless about the gate. She waited, her jeans illuminated at the knees by the red taillights of the truck. Jack and I were on gravel now and moved faster as we carried my nephew to the truck and Katrina opened the extra cab door for us and we hoisted my nephew inside. Katrina shut the gate as we buckled him in, and then we sped down the quarter-mile driveway. We drove fast, and my nephew passed out. We drove past the general store at the base of Trolley Road, the road that leads to the ranch, and turned onto the highway.

As we picked up speed, Katrina spoke to us from the back, “This must be how it was the night you ran away from home.”

I didn’t say anything. Jack looked at her, but didn’t say anything.

On the way to the hospital, which was a 40-minute drive, Katrina held my nephew, Colin, that’s his name, whose face went grey, then greyer. Jack and I thought in silence about D’Artagnan. The sunset shrank, then left us. The high beams on the truck illuminated the hordes of flies that had just hatched on the river, just off the road, down an embankment. I listened to the river, loud, through the window, but couldn’t see it.

Dad always said he’d rescued D’Artangan, and while probably that was true, later I wondered if he hadn’t taken a dog belonging to two other boys just like us, two other boys without friends, who worked all day all summer long, and didn’t know summer could be anything but work. D’Artangan was some kind of beagle mutt, an always-grinning, always-running sort of dog that was too fast for Dad to beat and brave enough to not cower when Dad beat us. He never jumped between Dad and us, but he barked and barked, as loud and hard as his little lungs could bark, and we loved D’Artagnan more than anyone or anything, even Cassidy, a girlfriend Dad brought home who would read to us for hours by candlelight when the lights went out.
Jack turned towards the back seat again, remembering his unconscious son.

“Pat still a nurse down there?” he asked me.

“No.”

Pat had died.

Jack looked out his window.

“His hands are turning purple,” Katrina said. “Should I loosen the tape?”

“No,” said Jack.

The hospital in town is small, but there’s an emergency room. He’d lost so much blood, I thought, but they’ll fix him up, just a dog bite, right?

We brought him in, and Jack helped a nurse who wasn’t Pat set him on the stretcher; we had called ahead, so they’d been waiting for us. Then Jack, Katrina, my nephew, and the nurse vanished down the hallway, and I was left looking at the receptionist, whose face I knew but not her name. She was on her phone and didn’t look up. I walked out through the revolving doors and onto the sidewalk and lit a cigarette and looked past the emergency entrance overhang to blackness beyond. You couldn’t see much because of the hospital lights. I probably smoked another cigarette.

I walked back inside and sat and waited, and waited, and after 30 minutes went to the receptionist and asked how he was doing. She got up and walked down the same hallway the others had and came back. She gave me a thorough update, as if she’d been the doctor, and I had been Colin’s father. I thanked her, grateful to know that he was going to live, that he’d taken a transfusion without issue, and she even, having guessed who Jack was, and knowing who I was (she probably remembered there’d been another Bauman boy), told me Jack and the boy’s mother were doing fine too.

“Will they be out soon?” I asked.

“Want me to let them know you want to speak with them?”

“No, that’s ok.”

“I’m sure they’re going to keep him overnight,” she said.

I went back outside and walked past the emergency entrance, past the parking lot, to the highway, where I could see at least some of the night. I felt good, looking towards the night, which I’d always loved, but had forgotten, until I’d moved back.

A coyote came trotting down the highway, a black shape emerging from the blackness, slowly gathering detail in the light blasting from the hospital behind me. And then it started to run towards me, and thinking of last year’s rabies outbreak, I turned and ran. I heard barking and I turned back towards the shape, much closer, and saw it running towards me, faster now, and saw that it looked like Belle. At least it was a dog not a coyote, it seemed. But some dogs had gone mad too, not just coyotes, I thought, so I kept running, then the barking came again and this time I was certain it was Belle, and I turned around and there she was, just ten yards away, running. Her run wasn’t friendly like D’Artagnan’s, nor was her smile. But she slowed when I called her name and trotted to me, obedient. I held her face in my hands.

“What are you doing here?” I asked her.

I felt someone behind me and turned and it was Jack and when I saw Jack I realized that somehow Belle must have hopped into the back of someone’s truck; the house was 25 miles from here.

“Isn’t that your dog?” he asked.

“Yeah I don’t know how she got here! How’s Colin?”

“He’s ok. We’re going to stay the night.”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks for your help.”

“Of course,” I said. “What time you want me to come back in the morning?”

“May as well come early, say seven,” he said.

“Sure thing.”

And it was me and Belle back in the truck, driving back up the long steady hill that headed from town to the ranch, and she smelled of Colin’s blood even though I’d wiped her face off before we got in. She nosed around the back, smelling Colin, smelling Katrina, then decided to sit up front, where Jack had sat, even though he usually sat in the back.

I rolled down the window and the night, even blacker now, even quieter, poured in, and Belle put her head out the window, and I heard her tongue lapping against the fast-coming air, and beyond her, the river, roaring from the recent rains.

“What do you think, girl?” I asked, looking at her.

She kept her head out the window.

I realized then that Jack would expect me to kill Belle before they came back to the house. My stomach tightened. I formed my mouth into a bite, like the way Jack did when he cut the duct tape. Katrina might not come back at all, I thought. Nor Colin. And Jack would come up alone, while they waited at the La Quinta, Colin asleep with painkillers, Katrina clutching her phone, watching TV to distract herself. And what would Jack say? Either he’d make sure Belle died — he’d offer to do it himself, thinking that would be generous — or he’d say, “We’re going to head on home. Best Colin rests in his own bed.” And if he said that, he’d probably never come back to the ranch. And maybe I’d go to Denver one day, visit them, come down for Colin’s graduation, or maybe meet a new baby, if one came. Or maybe I’d never go at all. The night came back and the high beams and the hordes of flies, and I leaned towards Belle and reached across the cab and put my arm on her shoulders.

I showed up at the hospital at seven. I brought pancakes and coffee. Katrina was asleep. Colin was asleep. Jack and I ate a few of the pancakes and drank coffee on the lobby couch, and another nurse who wasn’t Pat and wasn’t the woman from the night before walked from behind the reception desk with a clipboard.

“Not now,” Jack said.

We set our plates down on top of magazines on the coffee table and without saying the idea out loud exited the hospital to take the rest of our coffee outside. We stood in front of a bench near the sliding doors. I set my styrofoam cup down, pulled a cigarette from the pack in my breast pocket, and lit it. Jack asked if he could have one.

“You sure?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

I gave Jack a cigarette, and he put it in his mouth, and I lit it for him, and he smoked with one hand and held his coffee cup in the other.

“So,” he said.

“Yeah.”

He took a loud sip.

“I’m really sorry you were the one who had to do it. I just…I should’ve, but I couldn’t.”

“One of us had to.”

“No yeah.”

“You were 10. I was 12. That’s not a lot now, but it’s a lot then.”

“Colin could never do something like that.”

“Thank God,” I said.

“Yeah. That’s true.”

We smoked. I didn’t like being here during the day. I didn’t like leaving the ranch during the day. Too many people, and too bright.

“I’m not sure what to do,” Jack said.

“Katrina’s really trying. She’s really trying to like the place this trip.”

“Yeah I noticed that.”

“Means a lot,” I said.

“Really sorry about Colin. And the pears,” he said, scared. He took a drag, and started coughing, and through the coughs, said, “I’ll help you dig the hole, ok.”

“I know.”

 

Asa Merritt is a writer in Mexico City. He wrote Six Sermons, a 12-episode Audible Original series, starring Stephanie Hsu. He is at work on a novel through stories.